Chicago police shot fewer people in 2015

Police investigate at the scene of the fatal shooting of Ronald Johnson, 25, in October 2014. Despite grabbing headlines, police shootings were down 40 percent from last year.

Police investigate at the scene of the fatal shooting of Ronald Johnson, 25, in October 2014. Despite grabbing headlines, police shootings were down 40 percent from last year. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

While the video release of a Chicago police officer's shooting of Laquan McDonald prompted a domino effect of change, including the ousting of the police superintendent and a federal civil rights investigation, the department finished 2015 on an ironic note: Officers shot the fewest people that they have in years.

Chicago police officers shot 22 people in 2015, eight of them fatally. That's a 40 percent drop in the total number of people shot compared with 2014, when 37 people were hit by police gunfire and 16 of them were killed, according to department figures.

Since 2011, the number of people shot by Chicago's cops has gradually declined. That year, they shot 56 people, 24 of them fatally, department figures show. In 2012, Chicago police shot 45 people, killing 12, and the following year, officers shot 35 people, killing 14.

Chicago officers this past year shot fewer people than police in some other major cities. As of Dec. 21, Los Angeles police officers shot 37 people in 2015, 22 fatally, according to LAPD statistics. New York City police officers shot 32 people, killing nine, NYPD statistics from Dec. 29 show.

In an interview with the Tribune on Thursday, interim Chicago police Superintendent John Escalante attributed the drop in police-involved shootings to "better training" and "better front-line supervision," even though the Police Department and the city have come under national scrutiny for the way they handle such incidents, in light of the killing of 17-year-old McDonald by Officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014.

Tribune Graphics

Tribune Graphics

Under his old boss, Superintendent Garry McCarthy, who was fired last month by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the disturbing video's court-ordered release, Escalante said the department began so-called after-action reports of police-involved shootings by reviewing tactics taken by officers who fired their weapons and determining whether their tactics could be improved.

For example, after the department saw an increase in police-involved shootings in 2014 where officers opened fire on vehicles with suspects inside them, it reviewed the actions taken by the officers during each incident, Escalante said.

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"And in a few of those cases we reviewed, right away, we saw it was a matter of tactics, that the officers had put themselves in a position where they were in front of the car," he said. "And had they not been standing in front of the car, or off to the side, they would not have to have fired into the car as the car was coming at them."

In 2015, the department made a slight revision to its use-of-force policy by banning an officer from shooting at a moving vehicle — if that is the only weapon being used by the suspect.

Even in light of the McDonald shooting and other recent controversial use-of-force incidents across the country, Escalante doesn't think police-involved shootings in Chicago are down because officers are hesitant to shoot or afraid of being named in lawsuits. But he acknowledged the rank-and-file "might all have different opinions."

Escalante cited a 21 percent increase in 2015 in the number of arrests in which a gun was confiscated as evidence that his officers are doing their jobs properly.

"Our officers are not lying down, especially for those critical calls of shots fired and man with a gun," he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 03, 2016, in the News section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Department under fire, yet shootings by cops fell in '15" —
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